To puzzle….bewilder…confuse. The glare captured in this picture might loosely be described as “perplexed” because the traindriver thus caught has to decide whether he has time to berate the photographer or go and get more hot water for his elevenses. In the end, perhaps fortunately for me, he chose the latter.

I’m perplexed! Are you?

So we’re supposed to walk where precisely? Up the tree? On the water?

And what’s that “51″ all about? We mustn’t walk faster than 51mph? That’ll be the day!

I’m confused.

From my old and trusty (and that’s very old btw) Concise Oxford Dictionary 5th ed. (told you it was very old!):

Perplex Bewilder, puzzle, (person, his mind); complicate, confuse, (matter): entangle, intertwine

Hmm. Sounds a bit like my virtually permanent state of being.

So here we are then, my first contributions for this month. And be warned… I may well add one or two more!

Instruction Manuals, User Guides, why the hell do there have to be so many of the damn things? Wouldn’t it be far simpler just to have a sort of “Universal User Guide”, something along the following lines…

1. Switch on
2. Do the business
3. Switch off

How am I supposed to remember all these damn instructions, “tips” and whatnot… what with me an’ my crap memory an’ all? No wonder I can never remember which button does what with my head crammed full of different sets of instructions.

I’d really like to know why it is, when I’m thinking I’ve plugged my computer in, that some entirely unrelated bit of electronic gadgetry seems to start up of its own accord?

I’m confused!

Just as well I keep the computer kit and stuff out of the kitchen, else I’d find myself switching the kettle on for a cuppa every time I’m thinking of sending an email.

Hmm, now I come to think of it I suspect I do that anyway.

Perplexed.

(Sorry that I haven’t been around for several weeks but I hope that this topic challenges you all adequately…..!!)

October 26-30, 2009 is Halloween week at my office. Everyone in our department decorated their area/office and each day there’s a different costume theme (tomorrow I’ll be dressing as a clown).

My good friend Darren (the only other tree-hugging, nature loving, animal lover in my office…oh, and fellow nature photographer) puts a lot of effort decorating his office each year. Last year dead bodies littered his office….this year….body parts! YIKES! Darren by nature is a quiet, soft spoken, tender soul, but come Halloween, the man turns into a deranged psychopath.

Well people, this month’s theme’s proving to be a bit of a brain-teaser isn’t it?

So I thought it’d be a good idea to offer some little insight into my thinking behind it.
Truth of the matter is, we can all blame Mark for it actually! Heh heh.

Y’see, I quite took to heart what he’d said last month about some of our themes having been a bit specific, and going with something more general in nature.

Hmm.

But even “Texture” was still a tad on the specific side, so I started pondering what we could have that’d be truly general (as in pretty much anything you like) yet still focussed around some sort of topic.
And not too easy of course. After all, there’s no challenge in easy is there?

Tricky.

Then suddenly, completely out of the blue, it pops into my head… “Ramblings of a Deranged Mind”. Wide open to any sort of interpretation you care to put on it. But with a slant. And a sufficiently twisted slant moreover to appeal to my perverse sense of humour.

Must admit to having had some second thoughts about it before announcing it. And I tinkered with the wording a bit, substituting “Visions” for “Ramblings”. But it didn’t seem to have quite the same connotation so finally I reverted to the original thought.

Great. Have a chuckle. Announce it. Chuckle some more. And then it suddenly strikes me “Bugger! I haven’t a clue what I’m gonna do for this!”
“Hoist with me own petard” is the expression I do believe.

Bit of brain-racking called for then. And after pondering the matter for some little while it occurred to me that it all comes down to a question of approach. Determine that, and the rest should all fall into place.
So the approach I opted for was to try to put myself inside a deranged mind. Some may say that should be fairly easy for me. Heh heh.

What that led me to was thoughts of various compulsions, obsessions, fixations, fears, anxieties, distorted views of “reality” and so on. (Though of course those aren’t the only products of a deranged mind… er… not that I’d know anything about it of course!)
How best to convey this, any of this, in images then?

Once I’d started thinking in those terms the rest was fairly easy. Come the end of October’s first week or thereabouts I’d already knocked out three pics, and the month was shaping up to be one of those very rare occasions when I almost wished we hadn’t agreed on a “five pic cap” for the project.

In fact I was sorely tempted to create one of those slideshow thingies that I’ve been messing around with recently, and upload that. Would that then count as simply one contribution (regardless of how many individual stills comprised the slideshow) or not? But then I thought that would’ve been a bit of a cheat (even though the overall effect may have had more impact) so decided not.

Oh well. Yet another (probably naff) idea bites the dust. And likely just as well really.

So, the major challenge I faced was in deciding which particular images, of those that had occurred to me, to settle upon. And the next challenge wasn’t so much in capturing the raw images (raw as in source images rather than raw as in file format) but in manipulating them to get the various effects I had in mind.

Almost inevitably I s’pose the results are more symbolic than literal… and it may well prove they’re only symbolic to me.
But hey, that’s what its all about isn’t it?

Also, originally I hadn’t intended to upload my pics until very last thing… letting everyone else have a fair old crack at it first.

But as we’re getting towards the end of the month and the only person to have waded in so far is Darren with his rather brilliant pic (and what a super interpretation eh? Sort of looking at the topic from the “outside” rather than trying to get “inside” as I’ve done) I thought I’d help things along by bunging mine in now.

Just don’t expect any explanations of what they’re symbolic of though!

Down to the wire, eh?

Strange. When I first put forward the topic Texture for this month’s theme I had a number of ideas already running through my head. Yet, with each passing day I either: (a) did not find that for which I was looking, or (b) discovered something, but found it completely lacking once in picture-form. Not exactly the smashing return to Flickr for which I was hoping. I had been thinking completely in big and dramatic for this project. I had this vision of photographing bark on trees, the veins of leaves (like you, Tamela), broken bits of roadway (which is what I thought you had done, Darren, but I was mistaken – I’m still quite interested in knowing what it is you have photographed – quite the mystery), diamond plate steel….you name it and I was thinking about it. But in the end nothing I tried seemed to work and little that I saw inspired me during the month (for which there is a reason, but I won’t go into that here). It really came as a big surprise that I wound up going macro instead of big picture as I had hoped and planned.

Alas, I did manage a result and from the most unexpected of places, and by “unexpected” I mean it just suddenly came to me as opposed to having been planned.

And…

The bee, and many/most insects in general, are wildly entertaining to me in the various textures their bodies exhibit. Just look at my bee! The wings have beautiful folds and ripples. The legs have the most delicate, but distinct hairs. Much of the body is covered in either yellow or black fur/fuzz that must be incredibly soft to the touch. Even the eyes have a texture, which appears as a sheen in the photograph. If only I had a more powerful lens or a greater number of pixels so that I might have cropped and zoomed even more.

Of course, with these successes also came failures. The peanut was an early contender, but I was never really happy with the overall result. I tried a variety of lighting techniques and fiddled with the depth of field, all in hope of helping to make the subtle yet distinct textures more visible and apparent. In this endeavor I failed. But I only failed in obtaining the result for which I wished, but I did not fail for a lack of trying, which is something (quite a lot actually) when it comes to photography. Or so I think.

The photo of the small, winged insect may have gone better had I two things: (1) a higher powered macro lens or greater pixel count (for crop and zoom), and (2) a different orientation of the insect in relation to the camera’s sensor. The shot really needed to be taken from the bugs side in hopes that I could pull enough resolution from the image such that the fuzzy nature of the insect’s abdomen would have been more readily apparent. Unfortunately the little dead creature would not stay in position and I was forced to shoot in the manner which I did before I ended up breaking and/or crushing its incredibly fragile body.

So this month I’m considering myself rather lucky. My original plans and ideas were, for the most part, complete and utter rubbish. As such I had to abandon my original plans and create new ones, which I did. But these new plans met with limited success, but some success was found and for this I am quite grateful. It is this tenacity to keep trying and recognize when things are not working and deciding to move on that is so important not only photography, but so many disciplines in life.